I was born on 20th September 1921 in Viehofer Strasse, Essen, in a hospital which had been built by Krupp the big steel manufacturer. We lived in Essen in several different places, we moved around a bit. It was a difficult time in 1921. Germany was being made to pay, quite rightly I imagine, to recover the costs of the war, and the steel manufacturing was taken away, and it was a sort of a sequence. People didn’t have jobs and there was real hardship, which is why Hitler came to power … they were all being trodden down, there were no jobs, no steel industry, all sorts of things were taken away. Naturally they revolted and at that time Hitler was blowing his own trumpet I imagine, and he did have a lot of followers, only because of the way it was all playing out after the (first world) War.

Tell me about your
parents

My father did many a job. That was just it, there were no
jobs, you had to take and do whatever comes along. He did work on building or
any job he could get, it was a hard time. My mother had had a very good job,
she worked in the hotel business. She had very good clothes, and she was glad
to have these quality clothes because she didn’t get anything else for years.
Later she even made things for me, I remember that quite well.

Did your father serve
in the first world war?

That is a story all on its own, my Father ran away from home (family were quality shoemakers in good
trade) in Essen just before the first world war. He ran away from home onto
a ship which arrived in Buenos Ares as the war broke out. He was very young,
only seventeen, he went straight away to the consulate in Buenos Ares and said
he wanted to go back and fight the war. On
the way back when he was being shipped back, the French Navy intercepted that
particular ship and he was taken a prisoner of war, (civilian Prisoner of war)
and he was put into a camp in France and so never saw anything of the war.

He met my Mother because she was a colleague of an Aunt of
mine, his sister, and they came together, but I do know that they got marred in
April and I was born in September.

I have a sister, Ruth
she is still living in Essen, she is six years younger than me.

Did you have a happy
childhood?

I was probably quite happy, I went to school, I think I had
quite a happy childhood.

What was it like
growing up where you did?

How do you know when you are a young child? You don’t know
the ins and outs of parents struggling to feed you. You were happy with a slice
of bread with sugar sprinkled over it. That was lovely to eat. We had enough money to get by but not much.
Mother was good at managing money.

My Father would go off in the mornings at 3-4 o’clock to the
wholesale market and simply hump things about and help, hoping to get paid, but
he never did. But he always came home with bags full of fruit perhaps a bit
bruised and another bag full of vegetables. That’s was better than money in
those days.

There was a very nice lady a neighbour of ours, and she
didn’t have children, not early on when I was little. She would take me into
the garden and I had a little stove – methylated spirits you put in it.

And she would let me cut things up, and cook things on this
little stove, she was lovely. I think my mother had a bad time particularly
when my sister was born, and she took over for a while. Til later she (the lady
neighbour) had a son. I have a lovely memory of her.

What were your
interest as a child?

My father belonged to a (Gymnastics)
club, Allgemeine Tun Fahrein (sp?) it was called, and I belonged to it too we
did all sorts of things. I loved
gymnastics I was quite good at it. When I see gymnastics now, I remember doing
things on the two bars, how it hurt my arms. We really enjoyed that, my Father
was good at that, particularly on the rings.

Can you remember the
build up to the war?

Hitler was sort of blowing his own trumpet, all this rattle.
You see pictures sometimes when he is shouting, whatever he is saying. He just
got to people, to rouse them. He had that peculiar charisma, I don’t think I
ever quite got it, that might have been because my Father was so anti Hitler. I
imagine he thought Communism was the thing, which was exactly the same thing
but on the reverse of the coin isn’t it? A dictatorship, but he was definitely against
Hitler and I imagine I must have been influenced by his thoughts and so on
because I hated it and you knew that war was coming and of course much earlier
than Britain, because they started with Poland and Sudetenland, he tried to
annex all these smaller states and caused nothing but trouble, and in the end
Churchill had to say: We go to war.

I was 20 in 1939

My father was quite kind in a way, I do remember one
particular family, he took them over the border to Holland in their car. I
don’t know whether he got back, if they let him take their car or what, but he
did take them over the border to Holland, a Jewish family. Where ever he could
he would help, if it was something against the state.

BDM (Bundes Deutsche
Maedchen) was very strongly encouraged but father forbade us joining. He had a
big influence on my political views.

BDM, well that was the way he got them wasn’t it, even the
Pope he was in the Hitler Youth because that was the thing to do, and that’s
how he got them, young. For instance, you didn’t have to go to school on a
Saturday if you belonged to one of these Youth Clubs, and then you could go out
camping and all this sort of thing, which children liked. So that’s how he got them
and having a uniform. Of course, I never had one, because my father would never
spend any money on a uniform, but a friend of mine had one and I made her take
her jacket off because she had the shirt and the tie on and I had nothing. So,
I asked her to take her jacket off, so I looked like BDM maedchen, but of
course I didn’t last long, I realised what was going on. I don’t think it takes
you long to grow up when you see things falling apart around you.

Can you remember the
outbreak of the war?

There is nothing that stands out, I do remember the thing
with Poland because I was already working then. I had a three years
apprenticeship, you had a couple of days studying the theory of whatever you
were studying, then you worked.

I first worked for a friend who had started his own
business, and got married so he asked me when I had finished my apprenticeship
would I come and work for him because his wife had nothing to do with business
so she needed a bit of help.

But then he was called up and the business shut, so I had to
find myself another job and that is when I went to Emmerich. I was in Emmerich working in a good cafe at
the outbreak of war. I witnessed the invasion of Holland in 1940 from the
rooftops and served the invading soldiers in our cafe.

We witnessed the invasion of Holland, we were on top of the
roof seeing all the airplanes going over and the ‘parachutists’ coming down.
Then later on in the café where I worked we had four come in on crutches, they
had come down badly and got hurt. Then they were in the hospital in that area,
and I ended up in that hospital with Diphtheria, that must have 1941.

The Rhine freezing over; a friend of mine, a chap, he had
been on leave, and he said shall we go , and we went right over to Kleve, which
is right on the border with Holland.. and on the way back, clambering over
these big boulders, the ice had crushed together. We heard on a loudspeaker “Do
not cross the river, its very dangerous, the ice is shifting”. We got back
alright, only just I imagine.

I had a boyfriend who was in the SS: He was a lovely chap,
young. Blonde. You see they wanted them all to be the specimen, in the SS. The
poor chap didn’t know what it was all about I don’t think. He was just proud to
be in the SS, just for a few months and then he was gone. Don’t know whether he
was killed.

Were any of your
family called up?

We all had to go and have papers, you had to have an ‘ausweis’,
like a passport, you had to go and have a photograph which was stuck in there.
Well my father went and he said he couldn’t afford a picture. So, they gave him
a mark or whatever it was, and said go and have your picture taken, and he
never went back. I don’t know what happened but he was never was caught. But my
mother suffered, because she was worried all the time.

I had a cousin, Wilfred, he was taken prisoner in Africa, in
that campaign and he was sent to America I think. Why on earth would they send
him to America? I don’t know, I am sure they didn’t send people to America from
there.

My cousin was actually working for a Jewish family, there
were quite a number of Jews in Essen, the big shop owners were usually Jewish.
There was a certain area in Essen which was very smart, lovely little villas
and so on.

And my cousin was in a queue, for bread or something, and
she was defending a Jewish family, saying how nice they were and she had worked
for them for ages, and they were almost like parents to her. and the women must
have reported her, and she was called in. She was a bit simple because she
wouldn’t really think about what she was saying, and luckily the chap who was
interviewing her knew a thing or two and he was very kind with her, he told her
to be careful and not to say things like that and let her go, I don’t know what
happened to him, I think he did that to a lot of people.

Another family friend
had a mentally disabled child who was in a state institution. The daughter
happened to be at home in another room when an officer arrived and told the
mother that her daughter had fallen ill and was dead. The mother kept quiet and
then kept the daughter at home to protect her from the state pogroms.

Was it a shock when
war broke out?

I was quite ill, and there was an air raid, and I was so ill
I couldn’t have cared what was happening, but because of this air raid I was shut into a room somewhere, below the
hospital or somewhere, I didn’t know where it was, but suddenly I sort of came
to and looked around and there were the dead people all around me, obviously it
was the cooler place, the morgue, and I was waking up next to them. But I must
have been pretty ill as it didn’t fuss me at all. I would have been a bit
nervous, but I wasn’t.

There were nuns (in the hospital) I don’t know why because
Hiltler wasn’t keen on having nuns, but I imagine he couldn’t quite get rid of
them or he wouldn’t have had staff to run the hospital. I was in hospital with
Pneumonia and pleurisy later on, that was a few years later.

I lost my job in Emmerich, because I was ill. I went to a
doctor and he was very kind, he said you need a bit of a break, a bit of a
holiday, we will send you to a sanitorium. I went to Heiligenberg on the Lake
of Constance, beautiful, beautiful area. I was alright, I wasn’t that ill, I
could really enjoy it. Every afternoon we were lying outside on the
mountainside, there were like deck chairs, but a bit better than a deck chair,
with a big blanket over us in the fresh air.

I worked in Hagen after Emmerich, it was a sort of country
town it was very quiet. When the aeroplanes were sent over to bomb the dams,
the Dambusters that was it. They came over at that time, but it was higher up
from the town where I was. The water came rushing through the town as high as
the bridge (which you went over before the river was lower down) but there it
was practically over the bridge, just below, I just remember seeing a dead cow
come rushing down. But the farmer and his wife I think were lost there. It
didn’t really do all that much damage because they had already taken all the
heavy machinery from the works to the South of Germany, in the countryside
somewhere.

The young people were really nice, first we were about three
girls working there, and I ended up doing it all on my own as the girls all
wanted to be in the army, they didn’t call them by a very nice name, but anyway
they all wanted to be in the army. So, I was stuck, I didn’t want to go in the
army. The young couple who run this business were very nice, but the old man,
was, I think a number below 10, in the Hitler Party which was really quite
something. But he was the nastiest old man you could imagine, he really was. He
would sort of sit in the little room behind the shop, we would have our
breakfast or whatever there, and he would be sitting there, and he would make
sure that he would have his butter and his jam, and we didn’t
have very much of it. He was nasty, nasty piece of work. His poor wife was
still working and she was old, my word, and she still had the kitchen and doing
the cooking for us, for the the staff. Oh, what a place!

My family were all living in Essen, of course there was this
trouble of being bombed, Essen always being bombed. There was the news over the
wireless that Essen had been very badly bombed and many people dead, I just
packed up my case or my bag and went off on a train to Essen, I wanted to know
whether my parents were alright, there was no telephone or anything. I went off
on the train, there was a train in Hagen, but of course I didn’t get to Essen
for hours because they were always stopping because there were more bombings
going off. When I got to Essen, they couldn’t even get into the proper station,
you had to get out before it even got into Essen. As I was walking towards my
parents place I saw my father in the distance on top of all the rubble looking
for things. Our house hadn’t been directly bombed, it had sort of had a lift
from the other house which had been bombed. This house had lifted and fallen
down, so of course mattresses were alright, and pots and pans were alright,
metal things, but everything else was gone.

I went on a country walk with a friend and an aeroplane came
over, a lightweight one I think, it wasn’t a bomber but it suddenly started
shooting! Down this mountain road that we were on. We both looked at each
other, we had light coloured coats on, and threw ourselves into the ditch. It
was frightening. Eventually I was signed
off as fit enough to return to Essen. Train journey home was really long and
all trains were packed with soldiers. Family had been allocated (by the town) a
lovely apartment in Richard Wagner Strasse in Essen Sud, belonging to a family
who had left for the south for safety. The worst thing was, one day after the war I
was back in Essen, I was walking with my sister, I don’t know where to where
from it was I was walking with her, and there was a lorry coming past full of
English soldiers, and one suddenly took a gun, a big one, not a hand gun, and
just shot I could feel the heat and my sister just snapped her head away because she really felt the
heat, it did not hit her but I did (feel the heat) just walking next to her.
That was awful, I mean they couldn’t have cared less, nobody would have followed
that up, yes that was a fright. That must have been after the war was over,
otherwise there wouldn’t have been this lorry of English soldiers.

Tell me about the
camaraderie in your community.

Where I was living a lot of people
did not think like me and you had to be careful to keep your trap shut!, I
remember once in a café where I was working there was a chap who would always
come and have his coffee, he was a lecturer at the college, he would come in
and have his cup of coffee, and I said to him, there was a joke going around,
something about Goebbels and this nasty little right hand chap called Hitler. I
was making this joke and he looked at me and he said “Paula don’t ever repeat
jokes that you hear like that, it is too dangerous”, if people wanted to keep
their job they had to join ‘the parti’ a
particular party and if you are a family man, you had a wife and children, you
blooming well wear that thing (swastika) whatever, whether you agreed with it or not. I imagine
there must have been no end of people who would rather not have worn that, but
there you are.

We had enough food to go by, it was very dreary, being in a
café for a while we even had things to sell like cakes, which was quite something.
But even that cake went off by the by, we only had one old chap a baker, and he
occasionally made a cake but he usually took it home with him, he didn’t give
it to us to sell. So, what we sold was just drinks, nothing else. I mean how
they kept the place open I don’t know. But it was right opposite the station in
Hagen, and it was a big station for exchanging trains, people having to wait an
hour would come out into the cafe and have a cup of coffee.

I was running towards a shelter which had been built
specially for the people in Hagen, and as I said in Hagen we didn’t have a lot
of trouble with bombs dropping. But one night we had a real air raid and I
think I heard bombs dropping, but it must have been a good way away. I still remember
running and it must have been the fright or something, I had the taste of blood
in my mouth it was really quite horrible, and I heard these noises and ran and
stood in a doorway, as if that would have helped, but anything to feel a bit
safer. Then when I got to the shelter there was all that terrible trouble,
people having rushed down the shelter and of course once they were in there
they were feeling safe and stopped, instead of going on and making room, and
there were people were killed by being trodden on and asphyxiated but that was
awful.

After the war was
over

Because of ration books and all that sort of thing you had
to go to the offices and sign on so that you got your ration card and so that
you were properly registered because a lot of people had left and come back
again to Essen when the war was over. So,
you were called up if you wanted your papers and your ration books and all
that, and I went to the office and I was interviewed, and there was a telephone
call while I was there and the women talked to whoever it was and turned to me
and she said “Do you speak any English?” I said “Yes a little”, a bit I had
learnt at school, and that’s when they sent me to Villa Hugel which was the
seat of the Krupps the industrialists.

It was a beautiful house there right by the river, so they
wanted cleaner girls. So, I went for my interview there and got this job as a
cleaner girl, which meant pushing a vacuum cleaner or carpet sweeper or
something like that and a duster, because all the rooms had been taken over by
British, American, Dutch, Belgian they all were there all the little cliques
and so I started off as a cleaner girl.

By the lake at the bottom there they had a boathouse they
called it, where they did their rowing and so on and they had taken that over
for the officers to have a recreational place, a place where they could just go
and also go rowing and so on and they sent me down there to work, which was
nice as it was a really nice place. Not much to do, only one soldier who was
sort of in charge, and in the evenings the officers would come down have a
drink and so on, and I worked then as well as lunchtime. And then the girls up at
the big house in the bar and in the dining, room were all Polish girls, they
had the nicer jobs because the poor things had been brought over to work in the
factories, but I imagine, quite honestly, they had volunteered to go because it
was a better life than in Poland. There was a story going about that it was the
first time they had seen a toilet with a flush action on it and they had been
scared stiff, there were all sorts of silly things going around, which you
don’t know whether they are true or not, all sorts of rubbishy things. But anyway,
I did work there in the boathouse and after Stalin was asking them to send all
the Polish girls and Czechoslovakian girls back to their home, they had to go
whether they wanted to or not, and they did not want to go. They were in tears,
one or two quickly got married to some English soldiers and got pregnant so
that they did not have to go back. That was a horrible time, because they were
in tears not wanting to go back, I imagine they wouldn’t have known what their
life was going to be like.

But anyway, they had to go and once they were gone there
were all these rooms, all these places left in the officer’s mess bar and
that’s where I ended up. My husband was there, my future husband and I was not
believing any of, all it means you know, they are coming on their way through
and they’re going back home, they are not serious. But he was determined.

He was demobbed in November and was determined to get me
over and set everything in motion trying to get me to come and there was such a
lot of hoo- ha going on. One or two were trying to trick me to have something
to say, which would not have been a good point. But I remember one officer gave
a party, because I was going to leave the job and we were having some drinks
and there were several officers and one or two other girls who were working
there, and one of them was trying to make a pass and when I said, no I am
engaged to Laurie. He said Who is to know? I looked at him and said “I would
know” and he looked back at me, you know really properly and nodded his head. I am sure to this day that they
were trying to trick me into something like that, and then be able to say no,
no. But that’s the sort of thing, you will never really get the truth of it.

Anyway, I did get over here, and oh dear the journey. There
was such a rigmarole, and you had to be examined, very thoroughly examined.

We had to get married, which also was a joke, whenever we,
Laurie and I, went to see his relations or friends to introduce me and so on, I
would say “Oh yes we had to get married”, he would always say, “No, no, we had
to get married because that is the law.”

My Mother was in much tears, if there wouldn’t have been a
friend of mine staying with my Mother, sending me off, “Go on, go on,” I might
have not gone, because that moment of leaving my Mother behind not knowing whether
I would ever see her again, which was a possibility then, that was just awful,
that was the most awful moment.

But I got here and I was determined to be the last off the
boat. I had to make an entrance, didn’t I?